Night of the Dead News/Archive/4

The objective of this thread is to share some toplines on how fundamental game mechanics work. I intentionally will not go into further detail to ensure that players can still discover a lot on their own.

Player XP

XP unlocks new classes/ranks/game mechanics. You get XP by:

+ Completing missions

+ Winning the game (there is also a speed bonus)

Rating

Rating is a measure of your skill and is the primary factor in determining game difficulty.

+ Finishing missions completely & swiftly

+ Kill Bosses quickly

+ Winning the game (Nightmare / Veteran increases the bonus)

- Killing teammates

- Taking too many hits with a non-tank class (Demo/Assault are tanks)

- Failing core missions

- Death

Karma

Karma is a measure of how good/bad you are. When you have low Karma, your team is warned of your presence. With very low Karma, you can only play the 3 basic classes.

+ Staying until entire game ends

+ Playing Medic

+ Winning the game as newbie (assumes you're a good listener)

- Killing teammates

- Allowing too many civilians to die

- Leaving the game too early

Away For 1 Week (9-16 Dec)

Hi all, I'll be on a personal trip to Singapore starting tomorrow for a week. There will not be any map updates during this time. I'll upload the next patch on Thursday maybe. I'm meeting up some players in Singapore, so add me on Facebook (darenyoong@hotmail.com) if you're keen. I'll still be responding on the forums.

During the next 7 days, Earendil will be working on:

- Medals UI (you can temporarily type -m for now to see your medal points)

- Psi Ops Talents

- Forward Observer Talents

- Unannounced sequence in Sec Team storyline (end of Chapter 1)

NOTD Update - Dec 2010 (Month 4)

Completion Stage: 25%

We've developed a lot of content in NOTD and have consciously decided that we won't add anymore beyond the current WIP items. We start getting diminishing returns and the map becomes too chunky. We've also reached our map size limit (10MB) and can no longer add new material without optimizing our current content. From my qualitative observation, NOTD is one of the most content-rich maps available on SC2.

What we need to improve on soon is our polish. We aim to close most content work this month. Some ideas for polishing include:

- Less cluttered UI (removing a lot of the base SC2 frames)

- Revamped terrain (also creating a more coherent colony design)

- Finishing Moves (action sequences that turns the game into slow-mo during important kills)

SC2 Patch 1.2 is coming out soon with a revamped popularity system that tracks Time Played vs Games Played. This will help games that are long and large (NOTD, SoTIS, etc) get more air time. The new chat channels will also help players organize games and train new players.